Fool Me Twice. Ditto.

I’m a creature of recurrence, I guess you could say.


Last week, while I was riding on it, my bicycle seat fell off. My seat post bolt, which holds the seat mounting bracket firmly in place, had snapped.


Thankfully I was only twenty yards from the entrance to my school, so it was no big deal. I declined M’s offer to come pick me up, though; I figured I could just ride home standing up the whole way, which I realized that afternoon was a really bad idea, as my additional leg torque and handlebar tugging would surely, I was sure, result in additional bike damage. I ended up pushing the bike up even small hills–and I was so tired from the constant standing I could barely pedal down them.


This is not the first time this exact sort of seat loss has happened to me, which led my bike mechanic to exonerate me of liability. “It’s not like you’re 250 or 300 pounds,” he said. “It must be a design flaw in your seat post.”


Indeed, a few days before this, I’d noticed my seat was a little wobbly, and had tightened down that very bolt just a bit, to snug things up. I guess the bolt had stretched toward a snapping point, and the additional tightening just speeded up its final demise–which was a scenario exactly like when I first lost my seat a year ago.


Maybe I’ll recognize the symptoms in advance of my next unseating and avoid the whole ordeal (although hopefully there won’t be a next time, since my new seat post is a different design).


But don’t worry: this sort of inconvenient symptomatic forgetfulness doesn’t involve just my bike.


As I commuted in our car between two cross-county schools for last Friday’s faculty inservice day meetings, the car started jerking and bucking. I was certain the front wheels would both fall off within the next eighth of a mile, so I pulled over and hiked the eighth of a mile to a nearby Realtor’s office to call M so she would not panic if the police called to ask why our car had been abandoned.


A mechanical friend was willing to come look at the car after work, which would be three hours later, so I decided to walk a bit farther to Martin’s to use the free wi-fi (I had my school laptop with me).


On the way I stopped at a completely unhelpful Chevrolet dealership. “I saw you standing out there,” a man in the office said. “That’s the Z– family estate up that driveway where you parked. Both Z and his wife are passed, but that’s their land.”


Once at Martin’s, I realized that towing might be inevitable even if I did inconvenience my friend to come diagnose the problem, and so using the laptop (I love Gmail) I called around and found someone whose rollback was only twenty minutes away and would only charge $65 to carry my car across the county to a repair shop we’ve patronized before.


I read a bit and watched for the truck, which turned out to be a rollback indeed–that was mounted on a large pickup with two very large men already in it. I abandoned all hopes of a comfortable ride in a cool truck, and I certainly didn’t try to buckle any sort of seat belt, considering the man in the middle with whom, along with the truck’s passenger door on the other side of me, I was feeling way too intimately associated. I held my computer bag and laptop up in front of me to act as an airbag, just in case.


“That’s the Zs’ land, up there,” the driver said after we’d loaded the car and were on our way. “I stopped there once to see a grass fire, and they put me to work.”


The man in the middle grunted.


“That’s a ‘79. 354 block,” the driver said a bit later. “Beautiful car.”


“Yes it is,” the other man said.


Then, still later, “Look at that. This truck just passed 350,000 miles. I bought it new in ‘96 for $35,000. That’s a penny a mile. I’d like to know the gas I’ve put in it. Eight miles per gallon.”


I didn’t offer any math advice.


Anyway, to make a long, boring story less long, the mechanic found no problems with our transmission or axles. Whew.


“Let me go home and look at my files,” I said. “I think I remember having this problem before.”


Yup–as my car file showed, that time on a trip a few years ago when I was afraid to drive on because of exactly similar symptoms and we ended up spending the night in a Super 8 to await a nearby garage’s morning opening–a hotel stay that cost us…yep…about $65, if you include the breakfast at Subway the next morning–was caused by what I now know (again) to be leaky camshaft seals.


If only I’d remembered the symptoms from the first time! No wheels were in danger of falling off! I could have saved $65 and a squishy rollback ride!


Oh well! Better luck next time!